WordPress Performance Tuning: 15 Ways to speed up your blog

WordPress is one of the major website platforms in the world. It has millions of users, and the best part is that it’s constantly updated and it adds new features. That alone makes using WordPress a blast, and it’s one of the most impressive website platforms that you can find out there. However, there are downsides too. The more content you have on your site, especially high-resolution images, the harder it will be for you to have a site that loads fast.

In these cases the WordPress performance can hinder, and it’s the last thing you want to have. With that in mind, there’s no real need to worry. You just have to find the right WordPress performance tuning ideas and use them to gain the best possible results.

Switch to a new hosting service

One of the reasons why your website might be slow is because your current hosting service is not the best one out there. The reality is that finding a good hosting service will help a lot, and your primary focus has to be on value and quality here. Some hosting services are WordPress backed, such as Siteground, Bluehost or Hostgator.

Bluehost is a certified WordPress host and they are known for being very reliable. The costs are pretty low, however the support is not as fast as you might want. HostGator is another good option, especially if you want cloud hosting. But it’s not the best when it comes to shared hosting for example. It still works pretty well, however you have to take your time as you figure out the right options here.

Siteground is widely regarded as maybe the best WordPress host out there. They have been officially recommended by WordPress.org as the best hosting service. So if you want to speed up your WordPress, then switching to this hosting service might be the best idea that you can focus on.

Use a caching plugin

The caching plugins are great because they make it easy for user browsers to retain site data and load things a lot faster than imagined. You can also have great features like server-side caching, page-level caching, JavaScript, HTML and CSS minification as well as compression. A good cache plugin can help you with that, so it’s a really good idea to at least try using such a plugin, just to be safe. It can end up helping you a lot, so try to keep it in mind.

Optimize images

A great tip would be to try and make your images smaller. The smaller the images, the better the results that you can get from this. Image compression tools are available for download, some are also online based too. So you don’t have to spend a lot of time trying to find the right tool for you to use here. That will be an advantage since you can focus on getting the best experience and you will be more than happy with the results here.

Do remember that optimizing your images needs a great compression system, if you can automate it or batch compress stuff, that would be even better. The idea is to identify all challenges and tackle them the best way that you can.

Stop unused plugins

A lot of WordPress website owners add plugins left and right. But the reality is that you never use all plugins you install. Many of them just waste space and sometimes they can even hamper the WordPress performance. So the best thing you can do is to delete all of them quickly. It will work amazingly well, and all you have to do is to give them a shot at the very least. It will help you a lot, and it will bring in the value and assistance that you might need.

Update WordPress

This is a simple thing to do, but it works. The idea is that new versions of WordPress are designed to fix bugs, but they also tend to improve site speed too. That’s why a lot of people tell you to update everything, including the WordPress installation. Of course, it won’t work all the time, but it’s set to bring in front the benefits and value that you want. Do remember to create a backup before you do such an update. Believe it or not, lots of updates like this can end up failing, so you have to avoid any potential problems before they appear, just to be safe.

There are some systems and even hosting services that help you automate the process. That doesn’t mean it will work all the time, but it can provide you with the benefits and results you expect if you do this right. It’s a really good idea to automate the process if you can, just to be safe and ensure that nothing happens and you solve everything adequately.

Disable any hot linking

Hot linking is a process through which other sites link to your images. They do that in order to keep their website speed and avoid copyright. Since they just see your images and don’t really enter the site for something else, it’s just a way to lower your website speed without any benefits. The best thing that you can do here is to disable any form of hot linking, as this helps prevents situations when others are leeching the database resources and don’t provide any benefits or support.

Use a CDN

Content delivery networks allow you to access a nearby server instead of one that might be in another country. The CDN is designed to speed up your site, and the user will have a much better experience. Configuring the right CDN can help you a lot, and it will bring in front some really good benefits such as reducing the external HTTP request. Cloudflare is very good, then you have CacheFly as well as MaxCDN. These services are good if you want to speed up the website, and they will give you the value you need without that much of a problem.

Split the comment section into pages

Believe it or not, this helps a lot. The idea behind such an approach is that long comments can increase the load times. And honestly this is bad for your website. It looks great that you have lots of comments, but people might end up exiting your website just because they have to wait for a long time. Splitting the comment section into pages can help a lot, so try to use that to your own advantage if you can.

Clean up the database if possible

A good idea here is to eliminate any of the leftover tables that appear from the uninstalled plugins. You can use PHPMYADMIN to do this, but you need to be 100% sure about what you are doing at this time. However, you can also use plugins like WP Sweep that have a simpler interface and a fast way to handle all of this for you. Do keep in mind that cleaning this with automated tools might bring some errors, but it can still be a great experience with rewarding results if you do everything right.

Gzip compression

You can enable the gzip compression via the htaccess server file. You do need to talk with the hosting company or the developer to install this for you. WP Rocket is a plugin that can enable the gzip compression for you as well. The idea is that you compress pages and style sheets before sending them to the user. This way the user still gets access to your content, but he doesn’t have to wait a lot of time for his page to load. It will still be a smooth experience, and you can have lots of visitors. It works for everyone, and you will like it a lot in the end.

Opt for a minimalist website design

A minimalist website design helps with speeding up loading times. That being said, the minimalist approach is also something that customers like as well. They don’t want to deal with all the clutter, and that will be a problem. The best thing that you can do is to focus on eliminating unwanted features. Create a list with all those features that you want to add and stick to them. If you keep on adding stuff, this can be a problem. That’s why we recommend you to opt for a minimalist design, as it helps you boost the website speed and it also encourages people to browse a lot easier. Whenever you see a lot of menus it’s very hard to figure out what to access and how. The minimalist approach is a lot better.

Use transient cleaners

Since you cache data at the MySQL level, you might have some expired transients. It’s these that can end up slowing down your website. So you do need to find a way to handle the problem the best way that you can. Even if the caching mechanism can copy and save data, it won’t be able to clean up everything. The transient cleaner helps clean up the database tables and it will also ensure that you have enough space for the table to keep your data adequately.

Limit post revisions

Even if post revisions might not seem like a thing that slows down your website, in time they can do that. They take up space in the WordPress database, and in the end that can be very challenging. It will be a good idea to limit the number of revisions that WordPress keeps per article. It will make it easier for you to speed up your WordPress installation while avoiding any issues that can appear in the long run. Is it necessary to do this? Absolutely, you don’t need to keep all revisions anyway, so you might as well set it to keep the last 3 or 4. This way you can still revert to some of the previous content without having to access the first, original one.

Use only excerpts on the homepage and archives

Why is this important? Because you have less content on the page. And that will obviously make the page load a lot faster. It’s all these little things that can provide you with a speed bump if you use them right. That doesn’t mean it will be hard to do, in fact you can go to Settings/Reading and select Summary instead of Full Text. This also encourages your readers to go onward and browse other pages on your site. And that will always be worth it.

Never upload videos to WordPress

You have YouTube for that. Videos uploaded directly to WordPress take a lot of time to load. So the last thing you want is to have any videos uploaded this way. You can easily use YouTube, and that will help maintain the website speed as fast as possible. It’s a very good idea to keep this in mind if you can. That being said, you do need to keep in mind that you also need to remove all the previously uploaded videos. Add them to YouTube and remove them if possible. You will see a major speed bump on those pages where you had WordPress videos instead of YouTube videos.

In conclusion

WordPress is pretty fast by itself, but with these tricks, you can enhance its speed even more than you might imagine. It might take a bit of time to get the results you expect, but in the end it can deliver a tremendous value and quality in no time. While it does take a lot of work to implement and use all these things, results will be more than ok, and that’s the thing that really matters the most. Just remember, the most important thing is the overall user experience. As long as you can offer your customers a reason to come back and deliver a great website loading speed, people are bound to visit your site very often. And that will lead to great revenue in the end. So, don’t hesitate and use these tips and tricks to enhance your WordPress speed today!